Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977, then called Software Development Laboratories, after reading Edgar F. Codd's research papers on relational database theory while working at Ampex on a CIA-funded project codenamed 'Oracle'. Betting that IBM would be slow to commercialise its own relational ideas, Ellison and his co-founders shipped Oracle Database V2 in 1979, arguably the first commercially available relational database management system, years ahead of IBM's own product.

Over the following four decades Ellison turned that early bet into the dominant enterprise database franchise, fending off Sybase, Informix and Microsoft SQL Server through aggressive engineering and even more aggressive sales tactics. Oracle's database became the default system of record for banks, airlines, telecoms and governments, effectively setting the technical grammar in which the world's structured corporate data has been stored and queried ever since.

Ellison stepped down as chief executive in 2014 after 37 years in the role, moving to executive chairman and chief technology officer, but he has remained Oracle's most visible strategist and its largest individual shareholder. Under his continued influence the company pivoted hard into cloud infrastructure and, more recently, into supplying the data-centre capacity and database services underpinning the generative AI boom, striking major compute deals with OpenAI and other AI labs.

That pivot has made Ellison, once again, one of the world's richest people, with a fortune that has swung between roughly $200 billion and, briefly in September 2025, the largest on the planet, tracking Oracle's stock as investors bet on its AI infrastructure business. His willingness to commit Oracle's balance sheet to enormous data-centre build-outs has made him a bellwether for how far incumbent enterprise-software companies will go to capture the AI infrastructure opportunity.

Beyond Oracle, Ellison's influence over data extends through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's growing role as a neutral, multi-cloud database and AI compute layer for enterprises wary of over-committing to a single hyperscaler. Combined with his earlier stints on Apple's and Tesla's boards, Ellison remains a singular figure bridging the relational-database era he helped invent and the AI-driven data infrastructure era now reshaping it.